


Dream Eater

by SnarkyBreeze



Category: Original Work
Genre: A Plant Wrote This, Comedy, Dark Comedy, Dreams and Nightmares, Horror, Lucid Dreaming, Monsters, Nostalgia, POV First Person, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2019-11-08
Packaged: 2021-01-25 07:49:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21352747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SnarkyBreeze/pseuds/SnarkyBreeze
Summary: Everyone gets that feeling.  You know, that falling feeling?  Right before you go to sleep, when you’re half-dreaming about the friends you had in high school and you trip and fall down the stairs?You can’t breathe, your heart races. You know what comes next—CRACK!But the hit never comes.  You land flat on your back on your mattress, a little shaken up but safe from harm, probably not even tangled up in your sheets yet.  After all, you were half-awake the whole time. Home. In bed. Alone.At least, that’s what I thought, last time it happened to me.
Kudos: 3





	Dream Eater

**Author's Note:**

> This was my piece for the Spooky and Spice Zine 2019. The artwork is by the lovely drililali, who you can find [on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/_drililali_/?hl=en) and [on Twitter](http://twitter.com/drililali)!

Everyone gets that feeling. You know, that falling feeling? Right before you go to sleep, when you’re half-dreaming about the friends you had in high school and you trip and fall down the stairs? You’re weightless for a moment, and it’s absolutely sickening, because you’ve scraped your knees on the sidewalk outside that auditorium before—you know how much it hurts, especially if you manage to catch that crack that hasn’t been fixed in years. You can’t breathe, your heart races. You know what comes next— _ CRACK! _

But the hit never comes. You land flat on your back on your mattress, a little shaken up but safe from harm, probably not even tangled up in your sheets yet. After all, you were half-awake the whole time. Home. In bed. Alone.

At least, that’s what I thought, last time it happened to me. Last time, I was running down Pine Hollow to my grandma’s and missed the curb. Thought I would fall into the street just as the West Busway was rolling by, but instead I awoke, like surfacing from the depths of an ice-cold pool. Home. In bed. But not alone.

Before I hit the mattress, I saw  _ her. _

(I’m assuming it’s a  _ her, _ because it doesn’t seem right to call it an  _ it, _ and I’m too scared to call it a  _ him. _ )

By the time my head hit the pillow, she was gone, but I know I saw her. How could I not? Her silhouette took up my entire room, like a huge, dark, starless sky hunched over my bed. She was larger than me in ways too difficult to fathom, on a scale that couldn’t possibly have been contained by the walls of my room. Two dim, distant lights hung somewhere in the middle, their murky yellow glow staring right through me. She had a presence that exceeded her size—the room was filled with her ancient, earthy smell, the sort of methanous ripeness that you find deep in the woods. Heavy breaths puffed out from within the void of her shape, gusts of hot air that got caught in my bangs and made it hard to inhale. Somewhere between the eyes and the floor there was a mouth, but where exactly that mouth began and ended was lost on me. I only knew it was there because she was slurping up the last glimpses of Pine Hollow, her dark tongue shining and slimy in the moonlight as it curled around the crosswalk, sucking it down like the last noodle in a bowl of oodles. It was louder than anything I had ever heard, this low, rumbling, empty howling, like wind over a lake in a valley. Dandelion pods wisped around her face as the Sanders’ yard went with it, and then my dream was gone.

By the time my head hit the pillow, she was gone too, but one thing was certain: she knew I’d seen her. She must have known. I swore I saw those moons dilate the slightest bit as I fell, an abstract mimicry of the way someone’s eyes move when they’re surprised. She let out a snort like the rattling of bones and then blinked out of sight. Starless sky replaced by moonlit night.

Someone— _ Something _ was in my room. She watched me sleep. She ate my dreams. When I woke up, she dropped me and ran.

Which is why I’m on my fifth cup of coffee tonight.

I used to have someone to go to about these sorts of things. Grandma, for one. When Mom and David were at work, I had clear instructions to run to Grandma’s if there was trouble. It’s been almost ten years since I’ve been able to do that. I’d even lived with her for a while, before… Yeah. I was in college. It was better than living with Mom. It was  _ definitely _ better than living with David, whose cheeriness never really made up for the fact that he wasn’t—and never would be—Dad.

Grandma and I had our priorities straight. Tea time every evening: English Breakfast (decaf), Jeopardy, and Wheel of Fortune. Then she’d try to remember how to knit while we sat and talked about the news or girls or whatever was on my mind that night. She always insisted we talk about what was on  _ my _ mind.

“I don’t have much important to think about these days,” she’d say, counting stitches for the tenth time. “Come on, nothing you could say could bore me, Cookie.”

(She called me Cookie.)

(It was something my dad started.)

Grandma knew about my first kiss (with a girl) and my first date (with a girl). (She’d always say ‘with a girl’ as it made any difference. Maybe it did, to her.) She sewed the suit I wore to prom, bright red like I’d asked, and answered all the embarrassing sex questions that Mom just pretended not to hear. When she… After her stroke, it sort of felt like I’d lost a lifeline. Mom had moved across the state with David. I was stuck in Grandma’s house while I went to school.

I’m still in Grandma’s house, actually. Except now, it’s Cookie’s house. I got rid of that ugly mauve wallpaper in the bathroom and installed central air. Mom didn’t want it and didn’t want to sell it, and it felt more like home than anything I could find elsewhere, so I stayed.

And to think the Dream Eater, whatever she was, tried to eat it up fresh from my very own psyche. 

I want to know why. So I’m staying up to meet her.

I know I can do this, actually. There are a few crucial hints to suggest that horrible monsters with glowing eyes aren’t an occasional hazard of sleeping in my Grandma’s house.

_ For one, _ I’ve been falling out of my dreams for my entire life. Everyone has. Remember the opening paragraph? I asked, “You know, that falling feeling?” and you thought, “Oh yeah. I hate that feeling.” And then you kept reading to see what I have to say about it.

IT’S NOT JUST ME. SHE’S OUT THERE.

Maybe she’s not the only one! Maybe she’s just  _ mine, _ or I’m hers, or however an arrangement like that might work. Maybe she just belongs to this house! I don’t know! I don’t make the rules!

_ Two, _ she looked surprised. She  _ definitely _ looked surprised, which means she  _ definitely _ didn’t expect to see me wake up, which means she  _ definitely _ does this regularly without any fear of being caught. You don’t try something for the first time and not expect to get caught. She had every reason to believe that she could, I don’t know, pick me up out of my bed where I thought I was safe, slurp down my weird, surreal, stress-induced memories of Pine Hollow Road, and put me back down without one of those ‘oh shit’ moments suspended in time. She wasn’t ready to lock eyes with this dream factory. Too bad for her, because she tripped up. Now I’m onto her. 

Because  _ three _ , she has to keep coming back. She  _ has _ to keep coming back. What, do you think people… do you think  _ monsters _ just pick people up and suck out their dreams for fun? That it’s some kind of sport? Ten points if you get a nightmare without gagging on the bitter taste. Twenty if you catch something from start to finish without being interrupted by a snore that almost wakes your prey. No. Bullshit. Dreams are these things’ food. Obviously. 

I’m not going to go to sleep tonight, though. That’s too risky. For one thing, there’s no guarantee I’m going to have one of those half-dreams again. I’ve never been a creature of habit. I’m not due for another falling-out-of-sleep moments for at least another month at the very least. I assume. I haven’t had reason to keep track until now. These kinds of things sneak up on you—you don’t have to worry about them until you do, and when you do, you wonder why you haven’t before.

So, I’ve been researching dreams today. I’d say I started approximately ten minutes after she left, too shaken up to even attempt going back to sleep. I learned that dream eaters are a very popular concept in video games. Some other countries had creatures of legend, but those were more of like an anteater thing? And they seemed to eat dreams as a sort of nightmare extermination service. No urban legends about towering cryptids that chow down on your mental matter for sustenance, definitely nothing like an endless void with two empty yellow eyes. Those don’t come up on google, no matter how many how many booleans you use.

So I took a different route, something more pragmatic.

_ “how do you lucid dream?” “how do you dream about a certain event?” “can you dream when you’re awake?” “how to wake up from a dream?” _

I started stockpiling information. Lucid dreaming is a skill, but it takes time to build. The best way to do it is by developing habits that will give you an opportunity to engage. Set an alarm every five minutes. When it goes off, ask yourself if you’re dreaming. Someone said he wrote a word on a card and kept it in his back pocket. After a while, he didn’t need an alarm. Every fifteen minutes, he’d pull out the card and read it. It would say the same word. When he started doing it in dreams, he found that he could never read the word. Or it wouldn’t say the same thing. Or anything at all. It gave him an answer that signaled he could start manipulating what he saw and experienced.

That seems excessive.  _ Ob _ sessive, actually. Like, in an unhealthy way. It also would probably take weeks. All the same, I’ve been periodically reading this card that says ‘snail shell’ after every wiki article I read. It’s not like I think it will actually work. But I might as well try, right?

What I’m really trying, though, is the Dreamachine. It’s some stroboscopic light fixture that you’re supposed to ‘stare’ into with your eyes closed. It’s supposed to mimic the rapid eye movements that occur in sleep and cause while you’re awake. I think this is how I can get her.

There’s a version of the Dreamachine you can make with poster board and a record player. I got some LED lights and managed to attach them so the whole thing wouldn’t fly apart when it started spinning. Then I made a tube out the poster board and cut some holes for the light to flash through. When it spun, it was like I was a kid, falling asleep in the back of Mom’s car while David flipped through satellite radio channels. The greenish-yellow street lamps would whiz past in perfect rhythm, and the effect was hypnotic. I remember wild dreams of riding horses over rooftops—but I was riding with David, who ‘couldn’t believe there were so many channels on this thing!’

It’s a simple little thing. I set it up next to my bed so that I could lay on my side and gaze right into it. I’ll do it at night, so it’s not obvious. I’ll do everything like usual. But I’ve been drinking coffee since three in the morning, and there’s no way I’m falling asleep.

I just need to know it was real. Because, if not… I don’t now. We’ll get there, I guess. I’m not sure I’ll be able to sleep until I know. Weirdly enough, I think it’ll be  _ easier _ to live with her being real than her being some horrific hallucination. I mean, her breath blew back my hair. She smelled like sulfur and crude oil and pine. That’s too vivid to imagine—that smell lingered in my room even after I got up. Do hallucinations have continuity like that? I don’t know. I don’t want to. I’m not going to. I’m going to see her again.

The lights on this thing are kind of trippy, to be honest. It’s no wonder all those beat generation whackos were so into it. Then again, I’m the one sitting here with it whirring away in front of me, a sporadic strobe that pushes my ‘On Edge’ over the edge. I mean, it’s like a horror movie, right? The way my room is there-not-there-not-there-not faster than I can process. It’s a relief to shut my eyes. I do it before I even lie back, feeling my way around my bed until my head finds the pillow.

_ Snail shell. _

For a while it’s just a bad, boring rave, the Dreamachine lighting up red in my vision, illuminating my blood, lingering in hot white even when I’m in shadow. It’s hard to follow long enough for me to have that thought, and then that’s the new normal, a pinkish oscillation that morphs and shifts with the slightest little twitch of my face, until that’s normal too.

I feel like I should hold out my hand, scatter some herbs, command the darkness to show me Pine Hollow, but the moment the idea slips into my head, I’m already there. It’s autumn, that kind of dead, motionless autumn that holds all of my nostalgic memories. It smells like dying, drying leaves and frigid air. I know the smell from trick-or-treating. The sun in bright but lacking any suggestion of warmth, like if I were to look up into it, I’d see it on its way out, leaving the Earth to fend for itself.

I pull out the paper. There it is, a picture of a snail shell, just like I thought I’d find. Cool. I figure as long as I have some time, I’ll walk around the neighborhood, check out some of my old haunts. 

Heh. Haunts.

I walk right past my Mom’s house. I don’t need to see it. But there are some other places it’s just nice to see, to really envision. The elementary school playground where I got pushed to the ground for having “boy hair” and where I later made out with the girl who pushed me down. The creek where Paige and I found that deer bone and swore to high heaven it was a human’s. We ran for my grandma and took pictures from every angle we could think of and begged and begged to call the police. Then we actually googled what bones look like and wised up.

I wander. I go through all the old places, the ones that aren’t around anymore because of zoning and development. I check the post-it. It’s still that drawing of a snail’s face, the eyestalks poking out curiously. I wonder if maybe I’ll trip naturally or if I’m going to have to fake it. What if I can’t wake up? I’ve never done one of these machines before, maybe I’m going about it all wrong!

I’m feeling nervous. And when I’m feeling nervous, I go to Grandma’s. I run, like I did last night. Just like I always did. I run until I’m there, and it smells like potpourri and mushroom meatballs and basset hounds, those stinky beasts, and once I’m in, I keep on running. I can hear Alex Trebek on the TV and the raucous laser noises of the Daily Double. I can see the steam rising from two fresh cups of tea on their coasters on the coffee table. But Grandma’s not there. Maybe she’s in her room. I’m feeling full on  _ scared _ now. Jesus, I mean, this isn’t anything I’ve ever done before, and to think that it’s all because of some monolithic entity that turned my room into its own empty vastness. Maybe, even if it’s just my subconscious, even if it’s just my own thoughts and words projected onto this tripped-out dream puppet, I can ask her what to do. Maybe I can get an answer, like I’ve always gotten an answer, and have her back for just one second before I have to think about this.

I reach into my back pocket as I barrel up the stairs. Post-It note. The color of a snail shell. 

Wait.

Wait, oh shit.

Oh shit, no, I was supposed to be looking for writing...

No, no no no, I am dreaming. I’m dreaming and I didn’t even realize. How did I sleep!? I didn’t plan for this. I’m panicking. I’m dreaming and panicking and just before I reach the top step my foot slips. My ankle twists and I’m falling backward down the stairs.

It’s like cinematic slow motion. I can’t breathe. I can’t move. I can’t  _ anything _ except fall, and it’s in that moment that I remember Paige saying something dumb to me on the bus like, ‘if you die in a dream, you die in real life,’ like that could possibly be true, but what if it is? What if it—?

_ She’s there. _ _ _

The banister of the stairs is bending like pulled sugar into its indistinguishable maw, twisting away into oblivion and dragging the rest of the house with it. Those moonlike eyes widen just like before, but I’m not going to let her disappear this time.

“Wait!” I yell over the roar of this windy storm cloud of a creature. “Don’t go!”

I wasn’t sure it was going to work, but to my surprise, she stays, those lamplight eyes quavering a bit in the darkness. The Dreamachine is still running. The flashes pop in my vision and burns red against my eyelids when I blink, but for as bright as those LEDs are, they don’t seem to cast any sort of illumination on this shadowy chasm of a thing. It’s all sinew and peat moss and eternity, its rattling-chain breath practically drawing me in on the inhale. 

I can’t help but notice I’m not falling, even though I’m dangling in midair. I can’t feel anything under me, either. I’m too scared to look down, or anywhere other than those eyes.

“Are you real?”

My collegiate field hockey commemorative plate flies off my dresser. I’m not sure it’s an answer. It could have just been this thing’s tempestuous aura. I guess a hallucination couldn’t do that, though. Gotta give her credit.

“Do you eat my dreams?”

The two moons stay frozen where they hang. I guess there’s no reason why cosmic horrors would know human body language, even if they creep into their bedrooms at night and feed on their imaginations.

“Okay… I’m going to assume you do, you can drop me if I’m wrong,” I ramble nervously. I’m not really liking this ‘still and silent’ thing. I can’t tell if this thing can even understand what I’m saying. She hasn’t dropped me yet—too bad I don’t know if that means I’m right or just fighting a futile battle. “Look… I just… you’re freaky, okay!? Don’t scare people like that! Drop me if you would never eat or hurt me.”

Whatever has been holding me suspended gives out, and that old, familiar empty feeling fills my stomach, sending me crashing into the mattress. The hit is no less jarring as it was when I half-conscious and unexpecting, but this time, she’s still there. She’s still there, patient, motioneless, and… listening?

“You understand me?”

A basal growl rumbles against my sternum. Oh my god.

Okay. Okay, keep it together. I don’t know how long I’ll have her until she runs away again. My face is… some sort of wet, I don’t know. I pull my pillow into my lap and clutch it for dear life, because… I’m scared, okay?

Through some incredibly clumsy trial and error, we work out a communication system. I try to explain ‘blink once for yes, twice for no’, but she doesn’t seem to get blinking, even when I do it super-exaggerated using my hands like eyelashes. Maybe she just can’t do it. I gotta accommodate for her needs. We work around it. Eventually we work out that she’ll find a way to answer ‘yes’ and will not try to answer ‘no’. I’m talking and negotiating with darkness itself, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I looked down and saw myself dead on the comforter beneath myself, because I am scared to actual death.

“Are you the only one who… you know, eats dreams?”

Nothing. Abyss, two staring suns, and nothing else. Ok, so that’s a no. Got it.

“Do you and… I don’t know, your guys, do you do anything to people other than the dream thing?”

Another no. It seems like she’s even holding her breath, trying her hardest to be clear.

“You eat them, right? My dreams? That’s what you were just doing?”

Another dark rumble that feels like it’s about to empty my gut, and my alarm clock rattles its way off of the edge of my desk. A resounding yes.

“You don’t have anything else? Just dreams?”

Yes.

“Just  _ my _ dreams?”

Yes. The monster seems to swell and swirl with that one, almost like… like maybe she’s happy?

And I get it. The room strobes around me, still lit up by the Dreamachine, and this thing’s affirmation is deafening, like echoes through an endless cavern.

“Have I always been yours?”

No.

“Have you always been mine?”

Yes. Her answer is soft, if that’s even possible, a tender roll of distant thunder. It’s… It’s nice. I’m not scared of that, actually. Because she’s nothing new, she’s nothing I haven’t known, I am just coming to understand her now. Like this house. I’m hurtling into my murky future without any hold on what I’m supposed to be doing, but at least I have Grandma’s house on Pine Hollow Road to come back to, the old box television that still plays Jeopardy at 7 in the evening. I still have my monster, looming over me in the dark, slurping up my dreams, just as I always have since birth.

“Will you always be here?”

The bed shakes, its legs tapping lightly against the floor. I startle, the pillow tumbling out of my arms, but then I realize she’s only saying yes.

She’ll always be here.

And that’s not anything I’ve ever been promised before, not by anyone. 

Well, by Grandma. And to an extent, she’s held true. But I couldn’t go back to see her, even in my dream. I’ve lost her. And my dad. And my mom, really, ever since she and David moved across state, and Paige is married and starting a family halfway across the country. But the dream eater won’t leave. She’s been there through everything, she sees what I’ve dreamt in my best and worst times. They know everything I’ve hidden, all my lowest points, because I dream about them constantly, and she still gobbles them up as if they’re no different than my dancing with Cara Delevigne dreams. 

This house is empty, vast, and lonesome, but in the vast emptiness, I am not alone.

Those two full moons seem like they’re looking past me, darting back and forth from me to the space right behind me. My pillow floats up and re-positions itself at the head of the bed. I get the feeling she’s trying to ask if I’m going to go to sleep.

Oh my god, I’ve been keeping this thing from her dinner.

“I’m sorry!” I cry—and that’s why my face is wet, I guess it’s all been a little overwhelming. I sniff back the tears into some sort of half-cough, half-chuckle, and scoot back until I’m lying on my pillow. “I’ll try! I’ll try to sleep, I just don’t know if I… I drank all this coffee, and…”

A storm kicks up around my bed. She knocks the Dreamachine out of its plug, blocking out the moonlight as she tempests and turmoils around me. It feels like wind, but my hair isn’t blowing, like listening to a storm from the other side of a closed window. The effect is weirdly calming. Incredibly calming, actually. It’s getting a little easier to breathe deep, and I can no longer hear my own heartbeat pounding in stereo in my ears. It’s like shotgunning a cup of tension tamer, except a thousand times scarier, except I’m not scared of her at all.

I think she’s just going to wait here until I fall asleep. 

“You know, if you ever get caught again, you don’t have to drop me,” I say with a yawn, pulling my comforter up and around my shoulders as I start to settle in. “Not like you could scare me now, anyway.”

Thunder rumbles in the distance, a quiet intensity, but already I can feel myself drifting off. The first couple of nights sleeping in this house by myself, I was always so scared to fall asleep. But not tonight. Funny, you wouldn’t think having a giant Eldritch beast in your room would make you feel safe, but… she’s always been there anyway. Wherever I go. Gotta find a little comfort in that.

“Goodnight,” I mumble, my lips barely parting to form the word.  _ “Bon appetit.” _


End file.
